Repository | Book | Chapter

Any ideological operation that proceeds by way of positing a more or less narrowly defined set of correspondences forecloses in advance any inquiry regarding the contingent, and therefore—in principle—changeable relation of the ideological content to the world in which it is formed and from which it also departs. That is to say, the kind of thinking that would break open the fossilized structures of an ideological formation must first center on an investigation of the ways in which the presupposition of a stable correspondence in actuality works to displace and even dissimulate its own contingency. What kind of judgment, then, would be required to approach this set of concerns? What type of judgment would thinking have to elicit when it wishes to posit such norms or to evaluate such ideas, phenomena, and behaviors? This chapter examines what it is, in Adorno's thinking, that locates the core of such acts of judgment in works of art and, more generally, in the realm of the aesthetic.

DOI: 10.1057/978-1-137-55801-5_15

Full citation: